Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 📈 America’s chip industry is getting a boost
• 🏀 Another March Madness is in the books
• 🥊 Google’s fight against AI content-farms is showing promise

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~5.06-minute read (1,348 words).

P.S. First time reading? Subscribe here for free.

P.P.S. We encountered some technical difficulties yesterday that resulted in some stories and poll responses not being published to our website. Apologies for the error, we’re currently working to fix it.

"Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

–Albus Dumbledore (1881-1997)

And no, we’re not talking about potato chips (unfortunately). Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, will receive up to $11.6 billion in US government subsidies and loans as part of a newly announced deal aimed at reversing a recent decline in America’s semiconductor industry.

The funds are earmarked for a trio of TSMC chip factories currently under construction in Phoenix. In exchange for the subsidies, the Taiwan-based company agreed to boost its total funding for the Phoenix project from $40 billion to $65+ billion, representing the largest foreign direct investment in a new project in US history.

• TSMC, which makes cutting-edge chips for tech giants like Apple and Nvidia, also agreed to develop its next-gen 2-nanometer chips at one of the three factories it plans to build in Phoenix.

The deal is part of US lawmakers’ attempt to bring chipmaking back to America. The funds for TSMC come from Congress’ bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which went full Team America, __ yeah, setting aside ~$53 billion worth of grants, research funding, and other perks aimed at reversing the semiconductor industry’s flight overseas in recent decades.

• Between 1990-2020, the US share of global chip manufacturing fell from 37% to 12%.
• Now, thanks to new projects, the US is on track to make ~20% of the world’s cutting-edge chips by 2030, per the Commerce Department. (Rumor has it that senators are singing the Team America song in the halls of Congress.)

Big picture: The TSMC funding is the third major round authorized under the Chips Act, following similar subsidies for contract chipmaker GlobalFoundries ($1.5 billion) and Intel ($8.5 billion).

👀 Looking ahead… Further large grants are expected for Micron, a memory manufacturer building a chip plant in New York, and Samsung Electronics, which is constructing a factory complex in Texas.

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🇷🇺 The Russian Republic of Chechnya banned public performances of music considered too fast or slow. Friday's decision limits all public musical performances to music with a tempo between 80 and 116 beats per minute, with the policy intended to promote traditional Chechen music. The ban applies to many Western musical styles, including pop, techno, and rap. Artists have until June 1 to rewrite music that doesn't meet the criteria.

🇧🇷 Brazil’s Supreme Court is investigating X owner Elon Musk for allegedly obstructing justice. The investigation was announced yesterday after Musk revealed plans to disobey a recent ruling by one of Brazil’s Supreme Court Justices that called for X to block certain unnamed accounts. The ruling came as part of a broader clampdown on what Brazil’s Supreme Court deems as hate speech and misinformation. Musk, who called the Court’s ruling unconstitutional and against his principles, said his decision will “probably” result in X losing all revenue in Brazil.

🇻🇦 The Vatican clarified the Catholic Church’s stance on gender-affirming surgeries. In a 20-page declaration, which had been in the works for five years, Church officials delivered one of their most explicit rejections of sex changes, calling them a threat to human dignity. The Vatican also reaffirmed the Church’s view that gender identity can’t be distinct from biological sex at birth.

Another year, another nine brackets in the garbage. UConn defeated Purdue 75-60 in last night’s men’s college basketball national championship, capping off a nearly month-long NCAA tournament season that featured epic comebacks and dominating performances on both the men’s and women’s side.

Some key takeaways:

• It was a blowout-filled tournament on the men’s side. Prior to last night’s championship game, the average margin of victory in this year’s men’s March Madness was 14.4 points – the highest such figure since 1993, according to Sportradar.
• Caitlin Clark continued to shatter viewership records. Each of the last three games of Clark’s college career set new all-time viewership records for women’s college basketball. Iowa’s championship loss against South Carolina on Sunday was the most-watched basketball game at any level since 2019, averaging 18.7 million viewers.
• Both tournament winners also entered the history books. South Carolina’s 39-0 record marked the tenth undefeated season in women’s CBB history. And, with last night’s victory, UConn became the eighth team in men’s CBB history to win back-to-back national titles, with their +140 point differential during the tournament marking the highest ever by a men's title winner.

🤯 Fun fact: A women’s tournament bracket entry on ESPN named “Courtney’s COURT 2” set a new world record for longest perfect bracket across official online March Madness challenges, correctly picking 50 straight games to start the tournament.

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• 71% cited lower levels of anxiety, stress, and physical pain
• 82% stayed asleep longer, waking up 1.5x less per night on average
• 87% reported Slumber performed better than any other sleep aid they had tried

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Last month, Google Search, aka the pathway to Reddit for millions, altered its algorithms and policies in a bid to combat the fast-growing amount of AI-generated, spammy content ranking high in its results.

The tech giant says the changes, which emphasize elevating human authors with expertise by parsing through the internet footprints that accompany them (bios, work experience, etc.), will reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.

• Ian Nuttall, a prominent figure in the SEO community, has been tracking the indexing status of 49,345 websites since the changes. So far, 837 of the tracked sites – collectively accounting for ~21 million organic search visits/month – have been deindexed (removed from Search results).
• And the outcome seems to be (mostly) as intended. A recent Originality.ai study of these deindexed websites found 100% showed signs of AI-generated content, with 50% having 90-100% of their posts generated by AI.

But loopholes still remain. The Search Engine Journal recently chronicled an example of an obviously AI-generated content site consistently ranking in the top-10 of search queries after the changes, with experts saying this is likely due to Google’s policy of giving newly created websites an initial boost.

🥊 Bottom line: Spam and affiliate sites are locked in an ongoing cat-and-mouse, Whac-A-Mole-style battle with search engines. And, for now, Google just put a point in the win column.

💬 Quoted… “He’s really like a basketball genius.”

• UConn’s national title-winning men’s basketball team apparently had a secret weapon: Luke Murray, the son of legendary comedian and actor Bill Murray. He serves as the team’s assistant coach and, maybe unsurprisingly given his father’s background, has garnered quite a reputation for watching film – “from some obscure corner of the basketball world,” per the WSJ – which, in turn, has positively impacted the team’s offense. The season before Murray was hired in 2020-21, UConn’s offense was the 27th-most efficient in the nation, according to college basketball statistician Ken Pomeroy. Now, it’s at the top – in more ways than one.

🎭 Stat of the Day: 24 years and 12 seasons = how long the pretty, pretty good HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, which released its last episode ever on Sunday, was on the air. Fare thee well, Larry David, you relatable grouch🫡.

🤔 Did You Know?... Four of the top five ranked air forces in the world belong to the US, with each branch of the military – Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines – ranking.

📰 Worth a Read: Confessions of a Boston mobster's longtime girlfriend → (Boston Magazine)

• ☝️ Millions of Americans gathered from Texas to Maine to view yesterday’s total solar eclipse, with the path of totality engulfing 44+ million Americans in complete darkness for a roughly four-minute period.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Forecaster

• 💰 US markets closed mixed (S&P: -0.04%; Dow: -0.03%; Nasdaq: +0.03%). | 🤔 Markets are currently pricing in more than two quarter-point interest rate cuts from the Fed in 2024, compared with more than six expected at the start of the year.
• 🏦 Chase Bank is allowing advertisers to target its customers based on spending data.
• 🤖🚗 Tesla settled a lawsuit over the 2018 death of a Silicon Valley engineer who died in a crash involving its semi-autonomous driving software; the case was set to go to trial today.

*From our partners: 📈 Will inflation data crush the markets this week?... Find out the most likely move for any stock, index, or other financial instrument with Forecaster’s software. Easily analyze seasonal patterns, overbought/sold levels, and more. Save 20% on Forecaster with code DONUT20.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏀 John Calipari is reportedly leaving Kentucky to become the head men’s basketball coach at Arkansas.
• 🍿📅 Disney unveiled a new theatrical release schedule that includes a film based on The Mandalorian, a fifth Toy Story, and another installment in the Tron franchise.
• 🎶 Country star Morgan Wallen was arrested on reckless endangerment charges after allegedly throwing a chair from the rooftop of a six-story bar in Nashville. | ⚖️ Former Marvel actor Jonathan Majors was sentenced to participate in a domestic violence treatment program, avoiding jail time on reckless assault and harassment charges.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Dooeys

• 🌐📲 Google launched its long-awaited Find My Device network yesterday, with a basic functionality in line with similar offerings from Apple and Tile.
• 🧠 Synchron Inc, a rival to Elon Musk's Neuralink brain implant startup, is starting to recruit patients for a large-scale clinical trial that’s required to seek commercial approval for its device.
• 🫗 Harvard researchers recently created a programmable “intelligent liquid” that displays properties never before seen in natural liquids, per a new Nature study.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• ✈️ A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-800 safely returned to Denver International Airport on Sunday after the plane’s engine cover fell off during takeoff.
• 🚫📚 More than half of the top-10 most challenged library books last year have LGBTQ+ themes or characters, per a new American Library Association report.
• 🏥 Former President Trump said abortion laws should be left to the states and declined to endorse a nationwide ban in a video posted to social media yesterday. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 🌍🍽️ Explore the world's best culinary experiences.

Here are five stats from this past week that made our team go “whoa.” Hopefully you will, too.

• 😢💰 54% of Gen Z taxpayers say filing taxes has made them cry in the past, or that they expect it will this year. (Read more)
• 👨‍💻 Americans lost a record-high $1.3 billion in 2023 to scammers pretending to be from the gov’t or tech support. (Read more)
• 🎓 The average sticker price for a year of Ivy League tuition is projected to reach $89.7K this fall. (Read more)
• 👩‍💼📉 The percentage of women in the C-suite of publicly traded US companies declined last year for the first time since 2005, falling from 12.2% to 11.8%. (Read more)
• 🏢🏡 A plurality of US employees say they prefer full-time in-person work (46%) compared to hybrid arrangements (29%) or fully remote work (23%), per Morning Consult. (Read more)

Yesterday, we covered the Biden admin’s new plan aimed at wiping out large amounts of federal student loan debt held by Americans who fall under certain categories.

❓ Our question to you: Do you agree with the Biden admin’s new plan to forgive an unspecified amount of student loan debt for American borrowers who meet specific criteria?

• 👍 Yes: 38%
• 👎 No: 49%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 13%

Click here to read some of the best longform responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 4,189 votes and 368 longform responses.

Every love story is unique, but Amanda and Rob Ciesielski may be the first to have met via Duolingo. 

💍 The meet-cute: It all started in 2021 when Amanda noticed a user on the language learning app constantly sending "congratulations" messages when she met different milestones. Curious to connect with him IRL, the Filipino woman did some digging on Facebook and was able to get in touch with Rob in America. 

• The rest is history. Over the next two years, Amanda and Rob fell in love via video calls and care packages sent from across the world. 

👰🏻 Here comes the bride: The couple were married in the Phillipines last year surrounded by family and friends. In honor of the app, they had bilingual signs and greetings for their multicultural guests.

• "I am still floored to this day that I met him on a language learning app," Amanda said. "Who would have thought learning a language on a mobile app could bring you true love?"

🍌 Trivia: What name is typically given to bananas that are cultivated for cooking?

🌌 True or False?... Polaris is known as the South Star.

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🍌 Trivia: Plantains

🎓 T/F: False, it’s the North Star